The present invention relates to the data processing arts. It finds particular application in conjunction with the transmission of medical claims data from a physician's office to a central medical claims processing computer and will be described with particular reference thereto. However, it is to be appreciated that the present invention will find application in other areas, such as transmitting shipping data to a central inventory control computer system, transmitting check or invoice data to a central accounting program, and the like.
Heretofore, doctors have used printed, paper claims to communicate medical insurance information to insurance companies. To facilitate its own processing of the paper claims, each insurance company has a standardized claim format. However, the claim format varies from insurance company to insurance company.
These systems commonly include a small computer, an entry terminal, suitable software, and a printer. The software processes the entered medical service, patient, and insurance information and controls the printer to print a medical claim form of the appropriate form for the patient's insurance company. Commonly, the software does other processing of value to the physician, such as monthly reports, accounting statements, word processing, or the like.
There are currently thousands of different computerized medical insurance claim printing systems in physicians' offices. These systems run on numerous different models of computers provided by various manufacturers with different operating systems, and, of course, different software.
Manual entry of the medical service and patient information in the physician's office to generate the printed form and manual entry at the insurance company from the printed form into its computer is a duplication of man power. It would be desirable to make an electronic transfer of data from the physician's office to the insurance company's computer. However, this would entail replacing or reprogramming the existing computerized insurance claim printing systems. This arduous task is rendered more difficult by the lack of technical support for many of the installed systems.
Similar problems are encountered in other types of data processing in which information is manually entered to generate a paper output and entered again for central processing. For example, in shipping invoice printing systems, shipment information is normally entered manually to generate a shipping label and invoice. The inventory system is commonly on a different computer which is not compatible with the invoice printing system. Inventory information is again manually entered into the central inventory system in a duplication of labor.
The present invention contemplates a new and improved data transmission system which overcomes the above referenced problems and others.